If you want to lose weight then you’ve come to the right place. It doesn’t matter if you’re just looking to drop a few pounds for the summer, or have been trying to lose weight for years without success. All those diets, shakes and exercises have gotten you nowhere? Fret not! Science will show you the way.

What is Weight?
The first step is to understand what weight is, or the second step, right after letting go of that deep-fried Mars bar. Weight is what you get when you place a certain amount of mass in a gravitational field. This weight is not to be confused with the weight you read on the scales as you hold in your jolly gut, which is the amount of mass in your body. In science, weight is the force on an object when gravity is acting upon it. The more mass you have, the more weight or force you get as a result.

Gravitational acceleration
Another factor that comes into play is the gravitational acceleration. Gravitational acceleration determines how fast you fall to the ground when jumping out of a plane or off a building. On Earth, this acceleration due to gravity is 9,8 metres per second squared. This means that for every second that passes, you go another 9,8 metres per second faster. This applies everywhere on Earth and has nothing to do with the object falling down.

Force
When you multiply the mass with the gravitational acceleration, you get the amount of force acting on the object in Newtons (like kilograms, seconds, degrees Celsius etc.). If you want to carry that information with you as a tattoo, put it down like this: W=mg, or Fg=mg if you really want to impress the ladies.

Losing weight
From this it would seem that you can reduce weight (force) by reducing your mass. While this is true, reducing your mass (what normal people call weight) is nothing special and may be hard to do considering you still have that Mars bar in your hand! So what’s the other solution? Well, take a look at the above equations and see if you can figure it out. M stands for mass, g stands for gravitational acceleration. You’re not gonna go exercise to lose mass, so what is left? Exactly, gravitational acceleration. While you can’t change how hard the Earth pulls at you, you can go somewhere where the pull isn’t as strong. Have you ever considered a walk on the Moon? You should, it has a gravitational acceleration of only 1.63 metres per second squared, which is about 16.7% of that on Earth. This means you will only weigh 16.6% as much on the Moon and that is what you have been asking for all along. You’re welcome!

For some people it’s difficult to get into a relationship, others have problems with staying in one. From this observation it makes sense to work on staying in a relationship, so you don’t have to worry about getting into one. So just for those people who have found themselves lucky enough to get someone to like them, I will now tell you how to work on getting a stable relationship.

You might think going out for a romantic dinner every once in a while will keep the love between you two, but you would be wrong. Nor does it help to surprise your significant other with sexy lingerie or a steady income. What you really need to do is to stay in, sit next to each other on the couch and watch a film while eating copious amounts of junk food. Now you might think that a 500 pound whale would put you off, but you’d be wrong.

Inertia
Inertia is the tendency of an object to resist any change in its state of motion. This means that if you get a ball rolling, it will keep rolling in a particular direction with a constant speed unless you mess around with it. This is also known as Newton’s first law of motion. The reason you never see a ball rolling on forever is because gravity and friction slow it down.

Mass
Mass is a quantity which depends solely upon inertia. In other words, the more inertia an object has, the more mass it has. So a truck has more mass than a car, because it’s much harder to get it to move (unless you’re smart and simply step on the gas pedal).

Now inertia may not be something everyone is familiar with right away, but mass is. We all know that you increase your mass by eating, that’s how you gain weight. So the more you eat, the more mass you have and the greater your resistance to any change in your motion. So how does this help you have a stable relationship? Remember I told you to sit and do nothing but eat junk food? And what happens when you eat? Exactly, your mass increases and so does your inertia. No force in the universe will be able to move you guys around. If that’s not a stable relationship, I don’t know what is!

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I just had to share this story in Wired Science today. A physicist named Dmitri Krioukov was faced with a court hearing because he supposedly ignored a stop sign. In response to this he actually wrote a paper called The Proof of Innocence, in which he explains that the police officer believed he saw him running a stop sign, when in fact this was not the case.

Aside from not having to pay the ticket, he was also awarded 400 dollars for his paper. If that isn’t proof that science is awesome, I don’t know what is.

Did you forget your girlfriend’s birthday? Big mistake! But you don’t have to suffer a cold night next to your ice queen. With a bit of heat transfer you can warm her up and increase your chances of getting lucky tonight. Even though you don’t deserve it, I’m going to teach you how to melt her heart and prevent a disaster.

There are several ways of transferring heat from one place to another. Today I will be focussing on conduction between two solids, or bodies. Conduction can be described as a way to transfer energy within and between bodies of matter. These bodies of matter, or just your body, are made up of tiny particles that vibrate more and more as you heat them. Think of it as reaching for an object which you didn’t know was hot. You immediately let go and wave your hand in misery. These particles also wave, or vibrate, and pass this motion on to other particles they collide with. So heat tends to move towards a colder area, because the particles play tag from one end to the other.

Eventually the two bodies will reach thermal equilibrium. Basically this means that the difference between temperatures of the bodies is about equal and remains steady. This is mostly a theoretical concept since there will generally be another source of heat around you to transfer its heat to you (the sun, other people, a stove, a sauna, or an erupting volcano).

So much for the good news. I’m afraid I have to stress the fact that, if you want to melt your girlfriend’s chilling attitude, you have to … touch her. Yes gentlemen, that means you have to sit next to her on the couch, wrap your arms around her and pretend you care while not falling asleep. If you’re lucky, she won’t slap you in the face before your heat has transferred over to her body. Perhaps it’s a small consolation to know that you’ll be sweating bullets when you approach her, and so will have plenty of heat to give.

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If you are desperate for love, you may try anything; from blind dating to mail ordering a Russian bride. Both will likely leave you tied up in a dark room with an empty wallet. If you’re willing to go that far, you might as well try the following way to find your one true love.

For centuries, sailors and boy scouts have depended on one single instrument to show them the way to campfires and loose women, respectively. I am of course talking about the compass. A compass is nothing more than an instrument that points towards the magnetic north of a planet’s magnetosphere. To do this it uses a magnetized bar or needle that can freely move around on a pivot, or in a fluid. Even if you’re close to the south pole a compass would still point towards the north, although standing exactly on either the south or north pole would cause the needle to spin out of control.

Besides the magnetic version, there is also something called the gyro compass. This compass interacts with the rotation of Earth to determine the direction of north and south. These days we can use a global positioning system (GPS) to determine exactly where we are anywhere on the planet, but it’s still useful to have a magnetic compass lying around. And if you happen to be in a jungle without one, you can always make a make-shift compass with a magnet and a puddle of water.

You may be wondering how a compass can show you the path to your one true love, so let me explain. You have to concentrate really, really, REALLY hard on your greatest desire, open up the compass and watch how the needle slowly points in its direction. Wait, that sounds familiar. Wasn’t that the compass in Pirates of the Caribbean? Oh well.

There are several ways to increase your money but all of them either take time or involve a lot of risk. You can do it the old fashion way and just work forty hours a week and put your money in the bank to let interest have its way with it. You can also invest your money and risk losing it, or gamble and hope for a winning streak. Another way is of course robbing old people, but they have recently learnt to fight back. So what is left? Let me introduce you to the wonder of exponential growth.

Exponential growth means that the growth rate of some value is proportional to the current value. Say you take a piece of paper. The entire paper is one whole section and counts as value:1, then you fold it once and now you have a piece of paper with a line in the middle. The value has increased to 2. If you then fold it again you get 2 lines that divide the paper in 4 equal sections. Every time you fold the paper you increase the amount of sections exponentially. So you get 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc.

Here is the magical formula to calculate exponential growth: Xt = X0(1+r)^t. X0 is the amount you start out with, Xt is the amount after a certain time interval (seconds, minutes, days etc.), r is the growth rate and t is the time interval. You need to add the 1 because if you take a growth rate of 50%, the total amount after 1 time interval is 150%. If you don’t add the 1 (which stands for 100%, or the starting amount) you would actually end up DECREASING the starting amount, which is not good if you want to make money.

And now to put all this theory into practice. Let’s say you have a 10 dollar bill and you want to increase that amount. All you need to do is fold it. Every time you fold it you get an exponential increase which is only limited to the amount of times you can fold the bill. So quit your job and start folding money!

And now I would like to share with you a poem that is generally attributed to Edgar Allen Poe.

I’ll tell you a plan for gaining wealth,
Better than banking, trade or leases –
Take a bank-note and fold it up
And then you will find your money in creases!
This wonderful plan, without danger or loss,
Keeps your cash in your hands, where nothing can trouble it;

And every time that you fold it across,
‘Tis as plain as the light of the day that you double it!

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The sky has darkened, the wind is blowing, trees swing from left to right, dogs fly by: the storm is coming! Run! Or not. It’s up to you really, but if you decide to weather the storm I will give you a handy tip that might save your life. This is for all you sailors and coastal dwellers!

Ever heard of Christophorus Henricus Diedericus Buys Ballot? Neither have I. But he has a law that comes in hand during bad weather. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s called Buys Ballot’s law. In the Northern Hemisphere, if a person stands with his back to the wind, the low pressure area will be on his left, while the high pressure area is on his right. This is because wind travels counterclockwise around low pressure areas in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere the low pressure area would be on the right side, while the high pressure area would be on the left.

What the law basically comes down to is that when running away from a storm, you will experience less wind on the left side of the storm front. In Buys Ballot’s law this side is called the Safe Quadrant, while the right side is called the Dangerous Quadrant. Now to be honest, whether you are on the left or right, a hurricane on your tail is never a good thing. If you happen to be on a ship you might have a better chance of survival by steering clear of the storm, but if you are lying on the beach you’re pretty much screwed.